


we all make stupid mistakes sometimes

by orphan_account



Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Drinking, Fluff, Gen, Light Angst, M/M, Pre-Canon, Repression, and sammy and lily basically kiss to piss jack off mostly bc sammy's like, i have these Feelings and i don't know where to Put them so i'll just, it's the 1090 gang in college, not a lot of angst about it but it's lily so it's certainly there, sammy and lily kiss but it's nOT SHIPPY I PROMISE ON MY LIFE, they're all super repressed about being gay yknow, try and get jack's attention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:33:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27104284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “Boring,” Jack repeats. He takes a longer drink of his beer. When he finishes, he wipes some foam off his mouth, and says, “Obviously everyone goes at their own pace and has their own parameters for relationships and stuff, but Sammy, you gotta stop acting like every single girl has to be The One for you to date her.”“I know,” Sammy sighs. “I just— no, I don’t know, honestly. I don’t know. I’m in my own head and shit.”“Get drunk about it,” Lily tells him sagely.“Hell yeah,” he says, raising his bottle in a respectful salute.orIt's a Friday night, and the 1090 gang are lamenting their love lives.
Relationships: Sammy Stevens/Jack Wright, pre relationship tho it's just pining
Comments: 4
Kudos: 33





	we all make stupid mistakes sometimes

**Author's Note:**

> my friends joked about this and i hated it so much that i absolutely had to write it. enjoy a truckload of repressed jacksammy and a light sprinkle of lily angst for flavor! and blame my friends for this, not me
> 
> (also i just wanna say that re: writing lily's drinking problems, i'm pulling from my own life experience, and i'm not trying to make her miserable for the sake of trauma porn or whatever. i hate reading things where the author clearly just wants to make their characters suffer, and i cannot stress enough that this is NOT what that is.)
> 
> okay with that disclaimer outta the way: have fun ! feel free to leave hate comments, i deserve them !

This is Lily’s last time drinking.

Sure, she says that every time, and  _ sure,  _ she’s always lying, but this time? This time she’s being serious.

Though, yeah, it would be boring as hell to stop drinking before she’s even legally allowed to drink. Like, imagine going dry at age nineteen. Ridiculous.

So, okay, this is probably not Lily’s last time drinking. Especially considering that since Sammy turned twenty-one, it’s obscenely easy for them to get alcohol.

Not that Lily doesn’t have a fake. Jack, too. But Sammy likes to pull this ridiculous dad act where he tells her that she  _ really shouldn’t _ be going out and getting cheap vodka on a weekendly basis, and normally it doesn’t work on her, but sometimes, it does.

It works real well on Jack, though. Like, suspiciously well.

But Lily’s way too many beers in to think too hard about that right now. And she fucking hates beer, so that’s saying something. When Sammy buys the alcohol, though, that’s what she’s stuck with, for the most part. The trade-off for not suffering through his  _ not mad just disappointed  _ face is that he does not get enough hard liquor to sustain her.

She’s got her own stash, though, which is not something she’s about to admit to either of them, because Sammy’s weirdly insistent that she, like, has a “problem”, or whatever, which she knows she doesn’t. She can stop at any time. She knows she can stop at any time. People with “problems” can’t do that, but she can. Ergo, she doesn’t have a “problem”. The only “problem” going on right now is that she has to choke down beer to get herself drunk, but that’s a solvable one.

“Hey,” she says, but Sammy and Jack are too caught up in each other to care. “Hey,  _ hey _ , fuckers.”

Jack shakes himself out of his oh-so-engaging conversation with Sammy. “Yeah?”

“I’m gonna run to the bathroom,” she tells him, jabbing a thumb over her shoulder vaguely in the direction of where she wants to go. “Gotta pee.”

“Have fun,” he says.

“Dude,” she says. “I’m peeing, not celebrating a birthday.”

Jack’s already turned back around to Sammy, though, apparently so utterly fascinated by his drunken gesticulation and half-coherent ravings about fucking Call of Duty, of all things. And, yeah, Lily enjoys a good first-person shooter as much as the next girl-who-is-only-friends-with-guys, but damn, is CoD really that interesting? 

She stumbles her way through the shitty, tiny apartment that the three of them (and one more roommate who all but lives at her boyfriend’s house and whom Lily genuinely hasn’t seen in a month and a half) share. It gets sticky as hell during the warmer months, because the A/C is always on the fritz, and Lily thought she’d be fine with Florida weather, but it’s just so much more insufferably humid here than it was in California.

Whatever. It’s fine now, because it’s winter, so Lily’s not sweating her ass off as she fumbles for the handle of the bathroom door. She tugs at it, tugs hard, and for a moment, she’s filled with blinding rage at the door’s stubborn refusal to move.

And, uh. It’s a push door. 

She pushes. It gives way.

Lily’s a bit of a mess. Her braids are coming out of her neat bun, and she’d fix it, but it’s only Jack and Sammy, and she doesn’t have to be as put-together in front of them as she does everyone else. Her eyeliner is smudged, and she doesn’t know why, and her t-shirt is falling off of one of her shoulders. 

She tugs it back up, frustrated. She doesn’t need her shoulder on display. She’s better than that. 

The cabinet under the sink is a cluttered mess. Sammy and Jack are both awful at getting shit 

done, and she always complains about how anti-feminist it is that  _ she’s  _ the one who has to clean the dishes,  _ she’s  _ the one who has to fold the laundry,  _ she’s  _ the one who has to keep the house functional, but in this one instance, it’s a boon.

Lily pulls out a half-filled water bottle, the crinkle of it under her fingers strangely pleasant. The Poland Springs label on it is torn up. She hopes it looks like enough of a wreck that Jack or Sammy wouldn’t try to drink from it even if they found it, which she doubts they would. They keep medicine and toothpaste in the cabinet behind the mirror that’s above the sink, and since neither of them pull their weight around the house—okay, sure, maybe they both cook, and maybe Lily doesn’t know how to do much more than scramble eggs, but that’s beside the point—they’re not about to go searching under the sink. All that’s there is bleach, gloves, a jumble of other cleaning paraphernalia, and Lily’s hidden liquor, no different in appearance than water.

She leans against the sink and downs as much of it as she can. A bathroom break should only last so long, so she has to make the most of it. It’s not that she’s unpracticed, obviously, but the alcohol still burns her throat as it goes down, and she almost spits some of it up with how hastily she’s trying to drink it. 

“Lily!” she can hear faintly through the door. “Lily, c’mere!”

Quickly, she caps the bottle again and sticks it behind a thing of Clorox. She almost falls over racing back to where Jack and Sammy are sitting on the floor, but she doesn’t, which is good, because she’s determined to remain the only one in their trio who has never broken their nose. 

“What,” she asks flatly.

“I needed your opinion,” Jack says seriously. “Lily, what do we think about that girl from my journalism class?”

“Like, in general?” Lily sits on the floor, cross-legged, and braces her forearms on her knees, leaning forward. “I dunno. I’ve talked to her, like, once.”

“No,” Jack laughs. “I mean for Sammy.”

Lily considers this for a moment, tilting her head to the left. “Hm. I mean, I’m not opposed to it. She’s cute. Nice body.”

“Nice personality, too,” Jack insists.

“Like I said. I’ve talked to her, like, once, so I’m not gonna be as good a judge of that as I am of her body.”

“I’m not saying she’s not cute,” Sammy insists, and Lily doesn’t know when he decided to stand on a chair, but he’s sure as hell standing on it now. “She’s cute! Just, I don’t know her name, even. Also, if she’s in your class, what if she’s eighteen, or something? That’s weird. I’m not dating an eighteen-year-old. That’s weird.”

“You turned twenty-one two days ago.”

“Yeah, and it’s still weird!” Sammy insists. “I’m still way too old for her. Like, it wouldn’t be weird if I dated someone your age—” and he flails his hand wildly at the Wrights “—but eighteen? That’s fucking weird.”

“What, so there’s this massive difference between eighteen and nineteen?” Jack’s smile is bright, goading, and Lily grimaces at it.

“You’re almost twenty,” Sammy says. “So, no, there’s not this massive difference between eighteen and nineteen, but there  _ is  _ a massive difference between a three year age gap when the younger person is eighteen and a fifteen-month age gap.”

“So what you’re saying is you’re morally fine with dating my brother,” Lily cuts in. “Because that’s what I’m getting out of this, Stevens.”

“I don’t wanna date Jack,” Sammy insists. He insists it so vehemently that his bottle of beer goes flying out of his hand and hits the ground and shatters everywhere, and Lily says, “ _ Fuck _ ,” because she knows she’s gonna have to be the one to pick that up.

“Okay, good,” Jack says. “Because I don’t wanna date you. So that goes both ways.”

“Jesus,” Lily says. “Sammy, watch out when you get off that chair, okay? Don’t need you fucking your feet up in the glass. Like, I’d laugh, ‘cuz it would be fucking hilarious, but also I’d be pissed because you’d end up bleeding on my furniture.”

“Your— Lily, I’m the primary breadwinner of this household.”

“You’re fucking drunk,” Lily says. “You can’t win bread when you’re drunk. Also, you sound like a damn law professor with a stick up his ass, so maybe worry about that first. And– Christ, Stevens, watch out for the glass!”

Sammy, thankfully, heeds her orders. He’s careful as he steps off the chair, but not careful enough, because as soon as one foot’s on the floor—safely away from the shards of broken glass—he stumbles and starts to go careening backward.

Lily considers trying to get to him in time for about one second before summarily disregarding that thought.

Jack, though, has apparently decided to be a kinder person than her today—as is par for the course, honestly—and he pulls himself up and rushes over and almost nearly gets there in time. He doesn’t, though, and Sammy crashes into him, and they hit the ground in a tangle of arms and legs and laughter, and Lily wishes she weren’t so damn angry right now.

“I’m gonna get the dustpan,” she mumbles, but they don’t hear her. Sammy’s too busy trying to pull his arm out from under Jack and Jack’s too busy trying to pull his leg out from under Sammy and it’s all so fucking domestic she thinks she’s gonna puke. Well, it’s either that or the fact that she’s mixing her alcohols tonight.

When she gets back, dustpan in hand, Sammy’s flushed and seated at a decent distance away from both Jack and the glass. She sweeps it up as quickly as she can manage while intoxicated, runs it to the trashcan in the corner, and decides that that’s as good as it’s gonna get tonight.

“Did you come to any more of a consensus about that girl while I was gone?” she asks, settling into the now-vacant chair. She throws her leg over an arm of it, leaning backward over the other arm.

“What girl?” Sammy asks.

“Uh, the one my brother’s trying to set you up with, dumbass.”

“Oh,” Sammy says. Then, “No,” Sammy says. “We didn’t talk about it.”

“I think you should give her a try,” Jack insists, all sunshine and earnest eyes and  _ Christ _ , doesn’t that ever get tiring? To be so happy?

“Romance is a sham,” Lily announces. “Just keep that in mind.”

Jack turns on her with the speed and ferocity of a predatory cat. “You’re just saying that because you’ve never had a boyfriend who lasted longer than a month,” he says, accusatory. “And that’s a you problem, okay? Not a me problem. And not a Sammy problem, so don’t go projecting your issues onto him.”

“I don’t think I want to date her, though,” Sammy says. “Like I said. I don’t know her. So, regardless of if romance is real or not, I’ll pass.”

“You’re boring,” Jack pouts. He takes a long drink of his beer. “You could get to know her, at least. If you’re so insistent on getting to know her before you date her. Go for coffee! Take a walk on the beach!” 

“You did not just tell me to go for a long walk on the beach,” Sammy laughs. “I’m not a middle-aged white woman who reads shit erotica in her spare time.”

“You’re half of that,” Lily says. “So, like, close enough. And also, Stevens, if you don’t wanna date her, you could always just fuck her.”

Sammy screws up his face in distaste. “I don’t… ew. That’s not me.”

“Boring,” Jack repeats. He takes a longer drink of his beer. When he finishes, he wipes some foam off his mouth, and says, “Obviously everyone goes at their own pace and has their own parameters for relationships and stuff, but Sammy, you gotta stop acting like every single girl has to be The One for you to date her.”

“I know,” Sammy sighs. “I just— no, I don’t know, honestly. I don’t know. I’m in my own head and shit.”

“Get drunk about it,” Lily tells him sagely.

“Hell yeah,” he says, raising his bottle in a respectful salute. “That’s the goal, isn’t it? Happy fuckin’ Friday.”

“Happy fuckin’ Friday indeed,” she agrees. “Jack, throw me another bottle, will you?”

“I will not do that,” Jack says, and he gets up and walks over to her and places a bottle in her hand, “because I don’t need you picking up another mess of broken glass tonight.” When he sits back down, it’s closer to Sammy than he was before.

“I do want to, like, date,” Sammy says. It comes out kind of stupidly, but Lily lets it slide, because it’s past midnight and he’s under the influence. “But, yeah, I’m not about to stick my tongue down some girl’s throat if I don’t even know her— fuck, I dunno, middle name, or something. Or her favorite color.”

“What’s mine?” Lily asks coyly.

“Candace,” he says, and then, tentatively, “and red?” Quickly, though, he backtracks, and says, “No, I’m only saying that because your braids are red. It’s… shit, I know this, actually. It’s dark green, yeah?”

“That it is,” she confirms, voice low.

“So, what, that’s your criteria?” Jack asks. He’s just a bit too loud, just a bit too imposing, and sometimes, Lily can’t stand her brother. Sometimes, she wonders how he manages to be larger than life every single day, so painfully high energy, so unabashedly awful at filtering himself. Lily’s had to carefully curate the way people see her for years in the hopes that they’ll like her, that she’ll get herself somewhere, but it all comes so easy to Jack. He smiles and the world stops spinning on its axis.

“On paper, yeah,” Sammy says.

Lily looks at Jack, looks at how he looks at Sammy, and says, “Then you could kiss me now.”

He shrugs, seemingly oblivious to how Jack’s fingers have tightened around the neck of his bottle. “I mean, sure.”

“Okay, but what about the girl from my journalism class?” Jack says. “I mean, don’t you trust me to know who you’d like?”

“Dude,” Sammy tells him, stern. “I told you. I don’t want the… girl from your journalism class.”

There’s a weird silence between them. They’re saying something with their eyes, and Lily is too wasted and too fed up with their bullshit to try to decipher it. But she’s mad at Jack and she’s sensing that Sammy might be, too, and no matter what’s going on between them, she knows that Sammy loves getting Jack’s attention. He’s not as dramatic about it, not like Lily is with her deliberate way of pushing Jack’s buttons and getting him riled up in the way only a twin can, but it’s certainly there. 

It’s been there for a while, actually. Lily can’t recall the last time Sammy didn’t speak a little louder around Jack, didn’t push his shoulders back a little more. And it’s ridiculous, because he’s  _ Jack _ , dammit. He’s just some guy.

Whatever. Boys. Boys and their inane need to impress each other. 

“So,” Lily says dryly, but the rest of her sentence dies away in her throat when Sammy stands up, strides deliberately across the room, and puts his hands on her shoulders.

“Sammy,” Jack sighs. “She was kidding. She was making a point about how stupid your get-to-know-her thing is.”

“Yeah,” Lily says. “Yeah, Stevens, you’re a fucking idio—”

Sammy kisses her. And, honestly, she was not expecting him to actually follow through on it, so she’s taken completely by surprise.

She doesn’t push him off, though. Probably because she’s drunk and wants to feel something and Jack’s right, she can’t keep a boyfriend for more than a month, and she wants so desperately to feel like there’s nothing wrong with her, but it’s pretty damn hard to not feel that way when she drops boys almost as soon as she picks them up.

It’s weird. It’s really, really weird. She feels like she’s standing outside of her body, almost, like she can see Sammy pulling her up from her lazy lounge into a proper seated position in the third person. He’s kissing her, and he’s kind of awful at it, and she’s kind of awful at it, too, because it’s so fucking  _ weird _ .

Their teeth hit together. Lily winces. Sammy repositions himself and tries again, and it’s smoother this time, less messy, but it still doesn’t feel like much. Sure, Lily can feel his lips on hers and his hands on her shoulders and the weight of his body over hers, but she honestly might as well be kissing a mannequin. She’d chalk it up to being drunk if she hadn’t kissed tens of boys both drunk and sober before and felt…

Kind of the same way, actually.

“I— fuck’s sake, guys, I get the point,” Jack says. He sounds irrationally upset, his voice high and pinched, and that’s all it takes for Sammy to pull away.

“Sorry,” he says instantly. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have— that was weird. That was weird, and I’m really sorry.”

“It was weird,” Lily agrees, laughing. 

“We’re not— I’m not into you,” Sammy tells her. “Just if you needed some assurance.”

“Ah, a flatterer,” she deadpans.

He runs a hand through his short hair. “Really, I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”

“Me neither,” Lily says, very deliberately not cutting her eyes towards Jack. “We can just pretend this never happened, right? That was like kissing my brother.”

“Agreed,” Sammy says, shuddering. He’s still holding her by the shoulders, but it’s not so unpleasant now that he isn’t trying to make out with her.

She raises an eyebrow.

“Not that it was like kissing  _ your  _ brother,” Sammy says, backpedaling quickly. “Not that I would  _ know  _ what kissing your brother is like. I mean, I don’t even have a brother, so it’s not as if I— fuck, Jesus, the point is that yes, that was fucking weird, and it’s not happening again, and Jack—”

“Yes?” Jack asks sharply.

Sammy stays firmly facing Lily. “I’m really… Jack, I’m really sorry about all that.”

“‘S fine,” Jack says, though it doesn’t really sound like he thinks it’s all that fine. It’s subtle enough that Sammy doesn’t catch it, but Lily does. Lily knows Jack like the back of her hand.

“Maybe we’re drunk enough to not remember this in the morning?” she says hopefully, but even as she says it, she knows that’s not true. Even she’s not drunk enough, and that’s after downing her extra alcohol in the bathroom earlier.

“Yeah, even if you were, I memorialized that,” Jack says. He’s holding up a disposable camera, and in the chaos of Sammy fucking  _ kissing  _ her, Lily must not have heard the click. 

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Lily groans. She tumbles out of her chair, pushing Sammy to the side, and starts to crawl towards Jack. “Destroy that. Destroy that, or I will destroy you.” 

“Nope,” he says gleefully. “I’m going to keep this as blackmail. And one day, when you’re famous, I’ll get you to do all these favors for me, lest I release this to the public.”

“Jack, I didn’t know you were so evil,” Sammy says mildly. “It’s a decent look on you.”

Jack coughs into his hand. “Th–thank you,” he says, voice deliberately even. “You want another beer to get the residue of Wright out of your mouth?”

“I think so,” Sammy says. “I’ll just share yours, if that’s cool. Don’t feel like getting myself another.”

“Yeah,” Jack says. “Yeah, that’s fine.” He hands Sammy his bottle and Lily swears she isn’t making it up when she thinks that Sammy puts his hand around Jack’s for a second longer than is strictly necessary.

That is not something she’s sober enough to unpack right now, though. And she’s also not sober enough to unpack the fact that kissing Sammy felt deeply wrong, yes, but it also felt just the same amount of wrong as almost every kiss she’s ever had. Or the fact that Jack was trying to get in between them, or the fact that Sammy was trying to piss off Jack, or whatever the hell was going on with the whole  _ girl from journalism class  _ thing.

_ The girl’s cute _ , Lily thinks. She takes another pull of her beer.  _ Sammy could do worse than a cute journalism kid. _

**Author's Note:**

> hahaha do you get it. because JACK'S a cute journalism kid. i'm so funny.
> 
> title taken from stupid mistakes by lovelytheband. it's kinda an in-canon sammy about jack song, but mostly this is just a stupid mistake sammy and lily made and this song has been stuck in my head for a while. it's a shitty song by a shitty band but this is a shitty fic so who cares.
> 
> thanks for reading! kudos/comments always appreciated <3


End file.
